I've come to love Transcendence over the last few months. Recently I started getting slightly more serious about it, posting here on the forum, watching the Twitch, and trying out mods. I've been amazed at the long time modders and debuggers who have been committed to this game for 10+ years and know the game code inside and out. I've been frustrated that you (these modders) seem to work largely in isolation with little documentation, and when you want a simple change in the base game code you have to bug George for months or years to implement it. This seems to slow down development and shut down a lot of spontaneous creativity. If you worked more closely together, like a proper development team, I think you could easily create major new high-quality game releases in months rather than years and have crazy amounts of fun doing it.

Concrete suggestions:

-Allow seasoned modders to work directly with the base game code and give them more authority to make changes (pending approval).

-Consider incorporating the more well-balanced mods and quality-of-life enhancers into the base game. (I find myself asking why I had to download an obscure mod to have decent in-game sound effects! )

-Consider formalizing your working relationships so that you can have a more streamlined, "in-house" sort of communication flow. I love the idea of you all sitting around the same table. Perhaps this could include a more official status with Kronosaur Productions, a small stipend, and/or some other nice gestures that acknowledge your work together.

Pardon me if this is beating a dead horse. I would imagine many of you have talked about this stuff over the years, at least indirectly. I feel like this would radically improve the game, though. Who knows, you might even wind up with cool extras like an up-to-date website and game documentation!!!

A few of us, including me, do have the ability and software setup to work on the engine code. You can see our contributions to the Transcendence, Mammoth, and Alchemy repositories through George's Github page. I think the reason we don't do more, or make many major engine changes ourselves, is that it's a lot of work to understand how the existing code works, make improvements, and test them, and it's just an occasional hobby for us. I don't think George makes enough from Transcendence for it to make sense to hire anyone else. We do communicate through the forum, Ministry, and Github.

The mods I created were mostly quality-of-life improvements, and I've gotten most of that into the core game. I've encouraged the creators of other mods that are straightforward improvements to graphics or gameplay to do the same. SNAPSS would be nice, but I think it's considered unfinished. I haven't done any work on Transcendence recently, but I'll probably go back at some point and keep working on the AI combat behavior. Maybe I could also take a look at the tickets other modders consider priorities.

Calling SNAPSS "obscure" was partly a rhetorical flourish, since it's on the multiverse page, but I did learn about it from you. My point is that you shouldn't have to have a marketing campaign at all!

I don't think George makes enough from Transcendence for it to make sense to hire anyone else.

This is why I was suggesting honorary status and/or volunteer perks rather than hiring people.

You can see our contributions to the Transcendence, Mammoth, and Alchemy repositories through George's Github page.

Thanks. I took a look at the Github page, and I do see a lot of community input. Minor aside: I'm curious what, if anything, differentiates Mammoth and Alchemy?